New York City’s billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg thinks the Occupy Wall Street protesters shouldn’t be fighting Wall Street, because most of those people are “struggling to make ends meet.”
The “Occupy Wall Street” protests were organized by the hacking collective Anonymous against influence of the financial sector in politics, and have been slowly growing since they started September 17. Things are expected get even bigger this week, when some of New York’s biggest labor groups say they will join up.
But Bloomberg thinks the protests are against the wrong people. “The protesters are protesting against people who make $40-50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet,” he said on John Gambling’s WOR radio show Friday, Politicker NY reported. “That’s the bottom line. Those are the people that work on Wall Street or on the finance sector.”
“People in this day and age need support for their employers,” Bloomberg continued. “We need the banks, if the banks don’t go out and make loans we will not come out of our economic problems, we will not have jobs.”
He added: “Also we always tend to blame the wrong people. We blame the banks. They were part of this, but so were Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and Congress and you and me and everybody.”
Here’s the audio:
Via ThinkProgress.
